Make Art not Drugs

I don't do drugs, I drink very moderately. I always felt these things that supposedly heighten for some the experience of life, whether by blocking certain inhibitions or create other worlds to go into, sharpen sensory experiences, was unnecessary for myself because I live this way without the aid of anything outside of the self. Anais Nin participated in an experiment when LSD was still a newer drug (1955) for a professor who wanted a writer to be a part of it to be able to describe the experience more articulately than others were able to. The pages in the diary where she describes her "trip" are astoundingly, wonderfully beautiful, overwhelmingly sensational and breathtaking. But it should be said, not any more than her normal writing. After description of her experience she goes on to write this which I agree with 100% and is another case of Anais saying so much better how I feel about everything in life-


I reached the fascinating revelation that this world opened by LSD was accessible to the artist by way of art. The gold sun mobile of Lippold could create a mood if one was receptive enough, if one let the image penetrate the body and turn the body to gold. All the chemical did was remove resistance, to make one permeable to the image, and to make the body receptive by shutting out the familiar landscape which prevented from invading us.
What has happened that people lose contact with such images, visions, sensations, and have to resort to drugs which ultimately harm them?
They have been immured, the taboo on dream, reverie, visions, and sensual receptivity deprives them of access to the subconscious. I am grateful for my natural access. But when I discuss this with Huxley, he is rather irritable: "You're fortunate enough to have a natural access to your subconscious life, but other people need drugs and should have them.
This does not satisfy me because I feel that if I have a natural access others could have it too. How did I reach this? Difficult to retrace one's steps. Can you say I had a propensity for dreaming, a faculty for abstracting myself from the daily world in order to travel to other places? What I cannot trace the origin of seemed natural tendencies which I allowed to develop, and which I found psychoanalysis encouraged and trained. The technique was accessible to those willing to accept psychoanalysis as a means of connecting with the subconscious. I soon recognized its value. But then there is also the appetite for what nourishes such a rich underground life: learning color from the painters, movement from the dancers, music from the musicians. They train your senses, they sensitize your senses. It was the banishment of art which brought on a culture devoid of sensual perception, of the participation in the senses, so that experience did not cause the "highs," the exaltations, the ecstasies they cause in me. The puritans killed the senses. English culture killed emotion. And now it was necessary to dynamite the concrete lid, to "blow the mind" as the LSD followers call it. The source of all wonder, aliveness, and joy was feeling and dreaming, and being able to fulfill one's dreams.